In her essay, Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art, Sandra Seekins writes: “Biotechnologies reveal that bodies are composites of replaceable parts, open to reorganization, surveillance, and psychological and physical modification or augmentation. This can be an unsettling proposition, but one that is faced by artists concerned with the metaphors and media of biotechnologies. Although artists have always utilized technologies, contributing to and shaping discourses about them, those working with advanced genetic technologies are a relatively recent phenomenon, since the technologies themselves are still in their infancy. We should expect, however, that novel types of art continue to draw inspiration from art of the past.”
Biotech art is different from art dealing with other technologies in that genetic artists work with scientific techniques, merge biotechnologies and digital technologies, or deal with the metaphors of biological techniques. Before delving deeper into issues in biotech art today, let’s take a moment to “draw inspiration from art of the past” with a random sampling of pre-genetic-technology references made in literature and philosophy to “metaphors” of bodies as “composites of replaceable parts.”
“Consider the race of men, the scaly fish that swim in silence, the lusty herds, the creatures of the wild and the various feathered breeds, those that throng the vivifying watery places, by river banks and springs and lakes, and those that flock and flutter through pathless woodlands. Take a representative of any of these diver species and you will still find that it differes in form from others of its kind. […] Furthermore every individual animal of any species is a whole composed of various parts - bones, blood veins, heat, moisture, flesh, sinews; and these are all widely different, being formed of differently shaped atoms.”
Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe, 55 B.C.
“In our study of anatomy there is a mass of mysterious philosophy… yet amongst all those rare discoveries and curious pieces I find in the fabric of man… I find no organ or proper instrument for the rational soul; for in the brain, which we term the seat of reason, there is not anything of moment more than I can discover in the crany of a beast.”
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1643
“The human body is composed of a number of individual parts, of diverse nature, each one of which is in itself extremely complex.”
Spinoza, The Ethics, 1677
“These philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. The have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, 1823
“The stethoscope, a solidified distance, transmits profound and invisible events along a semi-tactile, semi-auditory axis. Instrumental mediation outside the body authorizes a withdrawal that measures the moral distance involved; the prohibition of physical contact makes it possible to fix the virtual image of what is occurring well below the visible area. For the hidden, the distance of shame is a projection screen. What one cannot see is shown in the distance from what one must not see.”
Michelel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 1963
“All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system…”
Marshall McLuhan, 1967
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction… The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.”
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs, 1985
“Out of the copier, no longer separate from other things, I am now limitless. The essential elementary self is gone, evaporated into a vigorous plurality of interactions. I discharge myself, time and time again, in a discontinuous flow, a passage of impossible state leaping into successive configurations. These are dynamic allegories for events to be; a spectrum of desires and impulses, willed, personalized then freely rescinded to corrupt into fresh fictions.”
Helen Chadwick, Enfleshings, 1989
other islands in this text-fed stream
